CP: My name is Colleen Murphy Paggi. Today is Friday, February 6, 2004, and I am at the home of
Steve Edwards in Tulare, California. This interview is being done in conjunction
with the oral history project of Tulare County entitled, "Years of Valor, Years
of Hope" in World War II during the years 1941 to 1946. Hello, Steve.

SE: Good morning.

CP: I want to start with some general background
and I wondered if you could just give me your full name and your date and place
of birth.

SE: My full name is Stephen H. Edwards, Jr. I was born in Post, Texas on January 12 1925.

CP: How many brothers and sisters do you have?

SE: I have two of each. I have two brothers younger than I am, Jay S. Edwards is seven years younger, and
Willis E. Edwards is fifteen years younger and I have one sister, Mary Inez (Quiroz), a couple of years
older and a sister, Flossie Mae (Neate) a couple of years younger.

CP: You were right in the middle?

SE: I was the number two youngster. I was the oldest boy but I have a sister a
couple of years older than I am. I was number
two out of five.

CP: What were your parents’ names and where were
they born?

SE: Both born in Texas. My father’s name, of course, is the same as
mine. He was the senior and I was the
junior. And my mother’s name was Robbie Edwards and her maiden name was
Stewart.

CP: Is her first name spelled Robbie?

SE: Yes. Actually that’s how we spelled it and that’s how she grew up. But her
first name is Robert and her middle name is True. She was named after her grandfather. She was supposed to have been a boy. (Laughter)

CP: So they named her a boy’s name. How cute.

SE: Texans do funny things when they name their
kids.

CP: Were all your siblings born in Texas?

SE: No. My two brothers were both born in California.

CP: So you moved here as a child?

SE: A small child, about three years of
age. And my sister younger than I was
just a babe in arms literally. She was not
even walking, just a wee small baby.

CP: Where did you come to in California?

SE: Came to the San
JoaquinValley. I went first of all to kindergarten in
McFarland. I went to first grade in
Earlimart and then we moved. We were
kind of nomadic. We were the
quintessential Okies. Anybody from the
Dust Bowl was called an Okie, whether you were from Texas, Missouri, or Arkansas,
whatever. And we were very poor. Didn’t
have two dimes to rub together, but we were part of the massive exodus from the
Dust Bowl out here to the San
JoaquinValley.

CP: Yes, I think, just about everybody . . .

SE: We were kind of nomadic. We moved around a bit and then we moved to Porterville. I went to school in Porterville through
sixth grade and then we moved out east of Tipton and we were cotton
farmers. I went to TiptonGrammar
School and TulareHigh
School. Tulare Union was the only high school we
had. We only had one high school in Tulare.

CP: Wasn’t it called just TulareHigh
School then?

SE: It was TulareUnionHigh
School. It was the TulareUnionHighSchool
District.

CP: My grandmother graduated from TulareHigh
School in 1917 and I have her class
ring and it just says T.H.S. How old
were you when World War II began?

SE: When World War II began I was just seventeen
years of age.

CP: So you were still in school?

SE: Yes. When World War II began I was just sixteen years of age, because it
started on Pearl Harbor Day as you will recall in December 1941. I was a very young high school senior and then
January, a month after the war started, a month after Pearl
Harbor, I had my 17th birthday. So I graduated and I was seventeen years of
age and worked out at Rankin Field. There were several of us kids that worked out at Rankin Field when it
first started. And we got to take care
of the airplanes, crank them up, rev up the engines, check the magnetos and
taxi them up to the flight line.

CP: And how old were you?

SE: Seventeen.

CP: When you went to Rankin Field?

SE: Yes. We’d get up at four
o’clock in the morning and go out there and do all of that
stuff and then get to school by eight
o’clock in the morning.

CP: So you were going to school while you were
working at Rankin Field?

SE: There were several of us high school kids that
were doing that.

CP: So you were still single when this war
started?

SE: Oh, my goodness, yes. And then we would go out in the afternoon,
after school, when the cadets had finished their flying and taxi the airplanes
out and tie them down, cover up the cockpit, cover up the engine cowling with a
canvas cover.

CP: How did you learn to do all that?

SE: I don’t really recall how I got that job,
but there were six or eight of us high school seniors. We were all buddies and running partners and
we got that job. And when I graduated
from high school I just stayed out there as a full time airplane mechanic until
I was eighteen years of age and I could take the exam to go into the old Army
Air Corps pilot training program as an aviation cadet.

CP: Do you suppose recruiters came to the high
school? Do you remember anything like
that?

SE: If they did I don’t recall that. It was maybe just a matter of convenience to
sign them up because they didn’t have to do any recruiting. World War II was a popular war, maybe the
last popular war this nation or any nation in the history of mankind will ever
see again. But we had kids running up
each other’s back to get through the doorway first to join the Marines, the
Army and the Air Corps.

CP: What a difference from now! What year was it that you arrived at Rankin
Field or started doing this work? Do you
remember?

SE: Yes. It was in my senior year. That
was in ’41. Rankin Field started at
Mefford Field here at the south end of town.

CP: Really.

SE: They were training some aviation cadets
there, off of that little Mefford Field, while they were finishing or completing
what we know as Rankin Field several miles out there to the east.

CP: You know I have never been to Rankin
Field. I was born in Tulare and I
have heard stories and I have never been.

SE: Well, I got to be a pretty good friend of
Tex Rankin and the Rankin family. Tex
Rankin had two sons and two daughters. Dale, the older of the two boys, was killed in a P-38, killed in action
in the European Theater and Willard was the other son. So one was just a little older than I and one
was a little younger than I. To go into
pilot training in the Army Air Corp, one of the requirements was that you had
to have a birth certificate because they checked you very carefully to see that
you were old enough, American born and a citizen and all that. Then you had to have three letters from three
different individuals attesting to your good character or that they thought you
were smart enough to learn, dedicated enough and had the right kind of moral character,
don’t you know, to become a pilot and an officer, and dumpty, dumpty,
dump. Tex Rankin wrote one of those
letters for me.

CP: He did. Did you save those letters?

SE: I did.

CP: Oh, that’s good.

SE: I still have it. Bob Norswing, who was the Vice President to
Tex Rankin at the flying academy, he wrote a letter for me. And then Ed Ball, the old retired Navy man
out at Rankin Field who was in charge of maintenance of aircraft and everything
. . .

CP: He just died a couple of years ago.

SE: Oh my. He wrote one for me.

CP: Did you know my mother and father bought Ed
Ball’s house on the corner of Merritt and Manor?

SE: No.

CP: Yes. They didn’t have it too long and sold it and moved again, but just
about, I think it was 1998, they bought Ed’s house.

SE: Now was this the same Ed Ball I wonder,
because this Ed Ball I’m talking about, he was an older man who had retired
from a lifetime of Navy service when World War II broke out.

CP: Well, maybe not.

SE: It may have been another Ed Ball. But yes, I still have those.

CP: The Museum loves things like that.

SE: And when I graduated from my primary flight
training it was Tex Rankin who got me back through Rankin Field for my primary
flight training.

CP: When you first started going out there, how
did you get there?

SE: (Laughter), I had a Model T that I bought
from a kid here in town, Harold Revel, and it had very good tires on it and was in good running shape. It was a 1924 touring sedan with a top that would come up or down. I paid big money for that. It cost me thirty dollars.

CP: Thirty dollars for a car?

SE: Yes and with good tires on it. Hey, that’s all right. Gasoline was only ten or eleven cents a
gallon but we lived on a farm and had a tractor and a gas tank and all
that. But it was Tex Rankin that, when I
was going to leave to go into the service, asked me, "How would you like to
come back through Rankin Field for your primary training?" And I said, "I would love that. That would be a little bit of heaven on
earth." So he told me to write to him
periodically when I was in the area and to let him know where I was, how I was
doing and where I was stationed and all that. "Most especially," he says, "if you hear or know anything about a move,
if they are going to transfer you or move you from one base to another, let me
know a couple of weeks before they move you," and I said, "OK, I will."

And I
kept in touch all the way along the line and when I was down at Santa
Ana for what they call preflight training down there
and we were ready for our assignments to primary fields, I was the only one
they called out to come to Rankin Field in Tulare. Others were going to Hemet and
they were going to Sequoia Field up here in Visalia and
other primary fields, but I came to Rankin Field for my primary.

CP: You had a little bit of pull, I would think.

SE: Absolutely.

CP: Now when was this? Do you remember what year that was?

SE: 1943.

CP: Well, what did you do before ’43?

SE: Worked at Rankin Field as a mechanic. See, I was eighteen years old in January of
1943 and then eligible to sign up for pilot training in the Air Corp program.

CP: When you became eligible, where did they send
you? You stayed at Rankin Field?

SE: No, after I went into the service, I went to
Buckley Field in Denver, Colorado. And
that was kind of a general type of boot camp with extended order drill. They treated us just like infantry
there. It was a boot camp for all
intents and purposes and we had that training. Then I went from there to what the Army Air Corp called a CTD,it was a
College Training Detachment. The Army
Air Corp had those all over the United
States, at colleges and
universities. So you went there for a
full academic program.

CP: Really.

SE: And it was intense. Before daylight and well after dark and we
didn’t even see an airplane. It was all
academics.

CP: Were there a lot of people in that? I’ve never heard of the Army Air Corp.

SE: During World War II the Army Air Corp
trained about a quarter of a million pilots.

CP: They did?

SE: Two hundred fifty thousand, roughly.

CP: So this Army Air Corp is part of the Army?

SE: Yes, the Air Force as we know it today was
not a whole dog as they say. What we
knew then, it was the tail of many dogs. There was an Army Air Corp. There was a Navy Air Corp. There was a Marine Air Corp.

CP: Oh, I didn’t know that.

SE: Yes. We were all coordinated. But yes, that’s the way it was. And the AirForceAcademy in Colorado
Springs did not come into being until
well after World War II was over. And by
an act of Congress, the United States Air Force Academy became an entity such
as the U.S. Naval Academy and West Point and so
forth.

CP: After your CTD, then where did you go?

SE: I went to the Aviation Student Training Program at Central Washington College of
Education in Ellensburg in the state
of Washington. That
was the 314thCTDCollege Training Detachment. From there I went down to
preflight, what they call preflight training, in Santa
Ana, California. And there we had all of the psychological and
psychomotor tests, the continuation of physical training and all. At that point we were called aviation
students. We were not aviation cadets
until we started flying. So at Santa Ana
all the psychological and psychomotor tests, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and
they were extensive, that’s where they determined whether or not you were going
to wash out, as we say, if you would be rejected or whether you would be
accepted.

CP: Gosh, I just had a thought I was going to ask
you. When did you first get in an
airplane and start becoming a pilot?

SE: The first time I got into an airplane to
become a pilot I got one or two little airplane rides that was just kind of an
orientation thing when we were aviation students with our college detachment up
in Ellensberg, Washington. But I didn’t
touch the controls. They just took us
for a ride.

CP: So what was it like when you first got to
actually pilot for yourself? Were you
scared?

SE: No, I thought about that a good deal. No, I was kind of puzzled because I didn’t
know what kind of feeling to expect, but I got upstairs. That’s the terminology you use when you leave
the ground and start gaining altitude. That’s called going upstairs.

CP: Oh, it is?

SE: Uh huh. So when I got upstairs or got up in the air, you were so busy with so
many new things and so many things you had to do that there was absolutely no
thought of fear of flying or getting killed or injured or falling out of the
thing. None of that ever occurred.

CP: That’s good. There is one specific question that I really want to ask you about
Rankin Field. Were there temporary
landing strips at Rankin Field and Sequoia Field?

SE: Well, temporary in that they were built for
a purpose and that was to train aviation cadets. Like a lot of other things, they were
expendable. But after the war was over,
they were still there. They served their
purpose, and the government had no more use for them, so they were sold or dispensed
with in some manner.

CP: What was it made out of?

SE: Black top.

CP: Just like a . . .

SE: Just like your streets are here today, your
streets and your roads.

CP: Were there more landing strips at Rankin
Field than there were at Sequoia Field? Or was it just about the same?

SE: No, they were pretty similar. During the war years they trained about ten
thousand aviation cadets at Rankin Field. About eight thousand aviation cadets went through Sequoia Field.

CP: Good heavens.

SE: So, just in those two little primary
training fields alone. But, like I say,
in the total mix of things, for the war years, in its totality, the Air Corp
trained about a quarter of a million pilots.

CP: When you were working, did you land your
airplanes at Rankin Field or did you ever land at Sequoia Field?

SE: No, they told us to stay away from Sequoia
Field.

CP: Why?

SE: Because that was a different airfield and
they flew a different airplane and they had their piece of paper they worked
from, if you will, and we had ours. So
there was a little bit of good natured competition among aviation cadets just
as there are kids that go to Western or Tulare High and they play
football. They didn’t want us "feeling
our Cheerios," as they say, and flying over there and jumping one of those
guys, getting in a dog fight or a rat race and destroying a couple of airplanes
and killing a couple of kids.

CP: Oh.

SE: We stayed out of their territory and they
stayed out of ours pretty much.

CP: When you got sent to Rankin Field, that was
in 1943. Did you live at Rankin Field?

SE: Yes.

CP: Where?

SE: In the barracks out there.

CP: They had barracks out there?

SE: Yes.

CP: What were the barracks like?

SE: They were okay, but it was temporary, too. My
bunk was stationary and it was made out of plywood and board and it had a
little mattress on it. You know, you’d
expect something better than that in a nice motel or hotel today, but, hey, it
worked wonderfully well at that time.

CP: What do you mean it was temporary? The barracks were temporary?

SE: Yes.

CP: They just put them up with the expectation of
tearing them down later?

SE: Right. Sequoia Field has been pretty well preserved because many of the
buildings out there that were taken over by, I guess county, governmental
agencies, the Sheriff’s Department and so on. They have utilized that and maintained it very nicely. Poor old Rankin Field out here looks like the
"Wreck of the Hesperus." It’s gone to
rack and ruin, but again . . .

CP: What is the Wreck of the Hesperus? What did you say?

SE: The Wreck of the Hesperus?

CP: What’s that?

SE: That was a ship. You can look it up on the Internet.

CP: How do you spell that?

SE: H-E-S-P-E-R-U-S.

CP: Okay. I’m sorry (lots of laughter).

SE: Oh, it’s just an old expression.

CP: Oh, that’s cute. Oh, shoot.

SE: Rankin Field just passed into the pages of
history and it’s not an edifice that has been maintained.

CP: It’s really too bad that they didn’t do more.
I‘ve never been out there. Is there
anything that even tells you that this used to be Rankin Field?

SE: There is an old hangar out there that still
exists. I went out there just a few
years ago to a Rankin/Sequoia Field reunion of pilots and so there’s a building
out there and the old central area where the flag pole was. It’s still there. There’s
a building or two.

CP: The barracks are gone?

SE: Yes they are.

CP: All during that time that you were at Rankin
Field, how many men did they process through there? During the war years.

SE: During the war years, Rankin Field trained
about ten thousand pilots.

CP: I’m assuming there were other people employed
at Rankin Field. How many people were
actually at Rankin Field?

SE: I don’t know that.

CP: Were there women employed there?

SE: Oh yes. Yes.

CP: So they employed civilians?

SE: Yes. Yes, they did. There were a few
military personnel there. There would be
a captain or a lieutenant. But all of our
instructors were civilian instructors.

CP: They were?

SE: Yes. Now that was true in primary training, but when we got beyond primary
training and I went down to Minter Field just north of Bakersfield, for my
basic training there, that’s when we had twin engine basic flight training
there, all of the instructors were Army personnel.

CP: What was the name of that field?

SE: Minter. There’s a museum there today, an air
museum that is beautiful if anyone wants to go down and take a look at it.

CP: There is? And it’s down by Bakersfield?

SE: Just about ten miles this side of Bakersfield where you’re
going south on Highway 99 and it cuts off to go out to Shafter. That’s where Minter Field is. They still have a hangar out there. But, you see, all of those old barracks that
we’re talking about, if they could be moved, many of them were moved onto
school grounds and sold to whoever wanted to buy one. They were Quonset huts. If they couldn’t be moved they were just
demolished.

CP: I wonder if there are any of them left around
here that people even used?

SE: Yes, probably. I don’t know where they would be.

CP: What did you do on your time off? Did you have time off?

SE: Didn’t have much time off, if any, because
there was a war on. If we were flying,
we were on a schedule and we flew.

CP: Where did you fly?

SE: All around the area here. You mean for training purposes?

CP: Yes.

SE: Yeah, we just flew all around the area. The sky was full of airplanes, like crows
coming in to land at night.

CP: Really?

SE: Oh yes.

CP: But did you go into town?

SE: Sure, we could come into town. It was quite nice for me because this was my
home. I lived here. So while I was at Rankin and Minter Field I
got to see my parents . . .

CP: You were lucky.

SE . . .and my brothers and my sisters. Very lucky. I’ve had some classmates and others that went through pilot training as
I did and they said, "How did you get to come back here? They sent me to North
Carolina. Man, I was in Montana, Texas."

CP: As I said before, you had a little pull.

SE: I had a lot of pull. If it hadn’t been for Tex Rankin, there’s no
telling where they would have sent me.

CP: Were there a lot of social activities between
the people in town and the soldiers that were all at Rankin Field?

SE: Absolutely. Those of us who were aviation cadets and went through the pilot training
program at Rankin Field, we were treated royally.

CP: I’ve heard stories. My mother was here during the war years and
she was always telling me about all the soldiers coming in to town and flirting
with the girls and things like that. She
said it was exciting here during the war.

SE: It was and as a group, if I might brag just
a little bit, but as a group we were young, we were very athletic, we were well
coordinated, we were smart enough to learn, we were dedicated and also the
military reminded us continually, "You are going to be an officer and a
gentleman, and if there’s any conduct on your part unbecoming an officer and a
gentleman at any point along the line, for any reason, you’re gone. You’re out of the pilot training program. We’ll
put you in the walking Army and you’ll be on a ship to Europe or the
South Pacific." So we were very
disciplined. We responded in like manner
and we could not speak unless we asked permission to speak. And anytime we were asked anything by a
superior officer we had only three replies,you could say, "yes, sir," "no,
sir," or "no excuse, sir."

CP: It was very rigid.

SE: It was RIGID in capital letters. Yes, it was. And it worked.

CP: You didn’t stay at Rankin Field the whole
time?

SE: No. I
stayed at Rankin Field until I got ninety hours of flight training there and
then moved to Minter Field for another sixty hours of pilot training, and from
there I went to Pecos, Texas for more multi-engine, what they called advanced
pilot training, where you learned instrument flying, formation flying, all
sorts of advanced flying things that the military required. We had primary training, basic training, and
advanced training in those three stages of our training.

CP: So how long did you stay at Rankin Field?

SE: Um, probably a couple of months.

CP: And so then, after you left Texas, where
did you go?

SE: I went to Lincoln, Nebraska. I graduated from pilot training at Pecos, Texas. That’s where we got our wings and our
commission.

CP: And then you went to Nebraska.

SE: I went to Lincoln Army Airfield in Lincoln, Nebraska.

CP: Was that out in the middle of nowhere?

SE: It was centrally located. It was right in the middle of nowhere.

Lincoln, Nebraska has a
few more people now than it did sixty five years ago, but it was just a big
town. We had about thirty five thousand
people on the base at Lincoln Army Airfield.

CP: How many?

SE: About thirty five thousand. About one thousand of us were pilots.

CP: Do you suppose that’s still there?

SE: Probably there is some remnant of the old
Army Airfield there, but my assignment, along with the others, was, we were in
what they called a holding pattern. But
my assignment was the invasion of Japan.

CP: It was?

SE: That’s what we were there for. That’s why we were building up. I was doing a lot of flying there and
checking out multi-engine pilots who’d come back from overseas from either the
European Theater or the Pacific Theater or the Chinese Burma/India Theater,
wherever. And they were pulled in there
and they hadn’t flown a single engine airplane for a long time. So I was checking them out and giving them
some flight time and some instruction on the premier single engine fighter
plane of the day which is what we called an AT-6.

CP: AT-6?

SE: There are a lot of them still flying
around. About 650 horsepower and had a
Continental, maybe a Pratt and Whitney engine in it. It was a good engine and a good airplane and
the best we had at the time, but that’s what our assignment was,the invasion
of Japan. We were just waiting for the green light. And of course they dropped the two atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and
that shut off World War II.

CP: So, they told you you were being trained for
the invasion of Japan.

SE: Oh, absolutely. We all knew that.

CP: I didn’t know that. I always heard they were thinking about it
before they dropped the bomb, but I didn’t realize that people were being
trained.

SE: Absolutely. We were primed and cocked and ready to go as they say. We didn’t know the details, young pilots such
as myself. All I knew, like some of the
guys a little older than I that went through the program a little earlier,
they’d say, "Okay men, you’re going to England," or, "You’re going to the
European Theater operations." You didn’t
know the details.

CP: Were you scared?

SE: No. No. Not at all. In fact, it’s kind of
like getting pumped up ready for a homecoming football game or something. You’re just all revved up and ready to
go. That’s what you have been trained to
do. You know, dying was not a thing that
was on the mind of anyone that I was ever associated with. I think we were all young and that’s not a
part of the real world. It wasn’t
realistic to sit around and think about dying. We all had a great fear,we didn’t want to get hurt; we didn’t want to
lose an arm or a leg or go blind or get burned, or whatever. Now that was real.

CP: But when you’re young you think you’re
invincible.

SE: True, true.

CP: Tell me what your attitude was about the
draft. Were you drafted?

SE: No.

CP: You joined up.

SE: There were a few pilots in the Army Air Corp.
They trained about 250,000 of them. None of them were ever drafted; all of them
were volunteers. You were there because
you wanted to be.

SE: There were a lot of young men who were
drafted. And so when they were drafted
they’d say, "Where do you want to go? Do you want to go in the Army, do you
want to go in the Navy or do you want to go in the Marine Corps?" Then they
kind of had a choice. But nope, if you
wanted into the Army Air Corp pilot training program, you had to volunteer for
it; you had to take the initiative; you had to do everything on your own. And if you didn’t have that kind of
initiative and stick-to-itiveness and tenacity, they didn’t use you. They put you in the walking army.

CP: What was your attitude about the draft? Did you think it was okay?

SE: Yeah, I thought it was, you know, the thing
to do. But I had nothing to compare it
with. The war broke out. I was a sixteen year old kid, seventeen years
old, eighteen. That’s just the way life
was.

CP: When you were in Lincoln, Nebraska, was
that when Jimmy Doolittle . . . didn’t he bomb Tokyo?

SE: He did.

CP: Were you in Nebraska when he
did that?

SE: Oh no.

CP: Did you leave Nebraska?

SE: No, the Jimmy Doolittle raid was very early
on.

CP: Oh it was.

SE: Yes, right after Pearl
Harbor.

CP: Oh, I thought it was at the end of the war.

SE: No, no. The Jimmy Doolittle raid was right after Pearl
Harbor, not too long after Pearl
Harbor, very early in 1942. We had to do something to retaliate after the
devastation of Pearl Harbor. We had to do something to strike the enemy in
their heartland and that was the result of the planning of the strike, what to
do and how to do it. And that was the
Jimmy Doolittle raid.

CP: Okay. Were
you awarded any medals or citations?

SE: No.

CP: None?

SE: Oh, I think I had a marksman or a
sharpshooter’s medal or something I qualified for on the shooting range, but
no, I didn’t even have a Good Conduct medal.

CP: Why not?

SE: They wouldn’t give them to those of us in
pilot training. They said there was a
Good Conduct medal which everybody got for good conduct, but not us. They said, "We expect you to be an officer
and a gentleman. If your conduct is not
good you’re not going to be here. So you
don’t need a ribbon." So I had no
ribbons at all. None.

CP: When the war was over, where were you?

SE: At Lincoln, Nebraska.

CP: What did you do when the war was over?

SE: You mean when we first got the news? Oh, everybody went to downtown Lincoln and
stopped all the traffic. The buses
couldn’t run. Nothing moved except foot
traffic.

CP: Everybody was happy.

SE: Screaming and hollering and pandemonium and
throwing hats in the air. Everybody was just
totally elated.

CP: Did you find opportunities because of the
service you did during the war? Did it
help you later on?

SE: You bet.

CP: What did you do?

SE: You want me to fast forward and tell you
what I did and when I retired?

CP: Yes.

SE: I finished a career in education. I came home and I had the GI Bill.

CP: Oh, you used the GI Bill.

SE: Every day of eligibility that I had I used
for my college education. And I chose to
move into education for my profession, and I retired as, they didn’t call it a
CEO then, I was President and Chairman of the Board of the California Teachers
Association.

CP: You were? For heavens sake, where did you live then?

SE: Well I lived up in the EastBay area. In the Walnut
Creek area, in the little town of Martinez, when I
moved from Tulare. That was in about 1955 and I lived there for
a while. Then I lived over in Burlingame where
the California Teachers Association office was right near the San
FranciscoAirport.

CP: How long were you the president?

SE: Five years.

CP: Did you teach in the classrooms?

SE: No, not then.

CP: But have you?

SE: Yes, I’m an old battling bulldog from the
class of 1949. I came back home
here. I went to VisaliaJunior
College, which is what it was called
then.

CP: Was that when it was still at RedwoodHigh
School or not?

SE: No.

CP: It was built . . .

SE: It was at its present campus, but it was
called VisaliaJunior
College and we were called the Tartars
then, not the Giants.

CP: The Tartars?

SE: T-A-R-T-A-R-S. Yeah.

CP: Well, you know I’m going . . .

SE: I was president of the upper class. You only had two classes, the lower and upper
class.

CP: Really.

SE: Just a two year junior college. I was president of the senior class or the
upper class and was editor of the sports page of the little paper there.

CP: How fun.

SE: Which was kind of fun, yeah. But I had enough solid academic work with
legitimate transcripts from Central Washington College of Education. When I came home I got those transcripts,
took them to VisaliaJunior
College and I was given a year and a
half of college credit.

CP: That’s wonderful.

SE: So I was a year and a half there to start
with and I got in three semesters at Visalia Junior College and then I went up
to Fresno State College and got my B.A. there in 1949 and hung on for a year of
graduate work. Then I was teaching down
here.

CP: I wanted to ask you two really important
questions. The first one is: How do you think the World War II years in TulareCounty affected you personally?

SE: Affected me personally? Well, I had an opportunity which I still
cherish to this day to move from a little kid following along behind horses and
mules on the farm out here on the alkali flats to move into the field of
aviation. I can’t tell you how exciting
that is. One would have to experience
it. But it affected me because I knew
that I could learn just as fast as these other kids could and I went into the
job at Rankin Field as being an aircraft mechanic which held great
responsibility and I got all of these opportunities that I never would have had
if it had not been for the war years and Rankin Field being established here,
right where I happened to live. So it opened
my eyes and gave me great opportunity and gave me a confidence that I could do
as well in competition with any segment of society that I wanted to, but I
would have to have the initiative and carry the responsibility to do that. So I think that was about the greatest thing
that happened to me. The opportunity
just dropped into my lap if you will, but I happened to be here at that time
and that was the opportunity that I had. That was how I grew up and grew into it and I’ll be ever thankful for
that.

SE: No. Tex Rankin was killed, and I forget what year it was, but he was in his
50’s. He was a man in his mid-50’s. He was killed in an aircraft accident on
take-off when he was up in Washington, where
he had moved after he left Tulare.

CP: Oh, I didn’t know that. I just don’t know much about Rankin.

SE: But he, Tex Rankin and his wife, Shirley,
and their son Dale Rankin, who was killed in the war, they’re all buried right
here in the old cemetery.

CP: They are?

SE: Right out here just a little off of
Blackstone across the fence there.

CP: How do you think the World War II years
affected the way TulareCounty is now?

SE: Well, a couple of things come to mind. One, if you just look at Rankin Field and
Sequoia Field, we pulled a total of 18,000 young men through here during those war
years, who were the brightest and the best that you could find anywhere. And the people of this county, I’ll tell you,
they treated aviation cadets royally. They really did. And the aviation
cadets interned were very thankful for that. I’ve been to some reunions of cadets, all of them we could find. They’re dying off; they’re getting up in
their 80’s. But they come back here and
they all have a tender spot in their heart for Tulare. But there’s also that segment who came here
and made this their home. So out of all
those young men coming through here about the age of finding a sweetheart and
marrying, much of that happened. And
this became home for a lot of people.

CP: The best and the brightest.

SE: They were pulled in here from all over the
nation and Tulare has
greatly benefited from that. Another
thing, too, I think that we found during World War II that we had to step up
the pace. When you have more than eleven
million people in the armed forces of the United
States and you have a full blown
global war going, you have to feed those people and we did a lot of feeding of
an awful lot of troops with everything we could grow here in the San
JoaquinValley. And a lot of technology was on the cutting
edge in those years and has advanced in this valley since. We feed the world, literally.

CP: Yes, we do.

SE: There is no greater, more fertile, area for
farming than TulareCounty.

CP: Did they have gardens and things like that
out at Rankin Field?

SE: No, didn’t have any gardens and things like
that out at Rankin Field, but everybody in town here, just like everybody over
the United States, grew a
victory garden. You didn’t have a lawn
in your yard, you grew your tomatoes, your okra, your peppers or cucumbers or
whatever. You had a victory garden.

CP: I just want to talk just a little bit about
your family situation during the war. Did it affect your family’s economic situation?

SE: I don’t think so. You mean my immediate family? We were farmers. Life went on. You did what you did.

CP: Were there difficulties getting food or
clothing or housing in TulareCounty?

SE: I don’t believe so, except the difficulty
that we experienced was experienced by everybody everywhere all over the United
States because things were rationed.

CP: Right.

SE: You couldn’t just get a new set of tires for
your car. Tires were rationed. Sugar was rationed. Beef was rationed. Everything was rationed. Gasoline, shoes.

CP: Shoes were rationed?

SE: Absolutely. Women couldn’t get silk stockings.

CP: I know. My dad tells me that.

SE: It’s true. That’s a true story. They used
all of the silk for the war effort.

CP: Dad said when he was over in Germany he
could get, not him personally, he could probably, anybody, if they had a pair
of silk stocking to give those girls over there, boy oh boy . . . laughter.

SE: Or sometimes even a candy bar.

CP: Yes.

SE: Or a package of cigarettes.

CP: Did any of your siblings or brothers serve in
the war?

SE: I have a brother younger than I; Jay, he is about 7 years younger than I
am; he was Korean War age. And then my
youngest brother, Willis, was kind of
a ‘tweener, you know. He was about the
age for the service when there was no war going on.

CP: Oh, yes.

SE: So he does not have any military service in
his background. My brother did during
the Korean War.

CP: Did your family take any vacations during World
War II?

SE: No.

CP: Did anybody? Do you suppose? I can’t imagine .
. .

SE: Maybe some did, but not much if anything,
because see, they weren’t building any automobiles during the war for people to
buy, so you had whatever car you had when the war started. And gasoline was rationed and you just didn’t
take trips. "Well, let’s take off from Tulare and go
to ShastaLake to the
boat house for a week or so." You just
didn’t do things like that.

CP: I still have my grandmother’s ration cards
that they used. The gas . . .

SE: Oh my gosh.

CP: Gas rationing cards. Did your family ever participate in war bond
campaigns or any other savings programs?

SE: I don’t know. I presume so because that was the popular
thing to do, and I know those of us who were in the service, myself, I bought
war bonds. Not very big ones. The smallest ones with some of my service pay
all the way along through my years in the service.

CP: Tell me exactly what a war bond is. Is it like a savings bond?

SE: Like a savings bond.

CP: And then did you redeem them after the war?

SE: Yes I did. I had some, not much money, but then very little money looked like a lot
of money then when you were going to school, so that’s what I did. What little I had I redeemed later to help
pay for my education.

CP: Oh, that’s good.

SE: With my GI Bill I got $65 a month. And they paid my tuition and bought me a three-ring
binder and a dictionary and some basic things like that.

CP: I think that GI Bill was one of the greatest
things that ever came out of World War II.

SE: Absolutely. It was my salvation because there was no money in my family and I knew
that my family could not send me to a college or a university. The GI Bill was absolutely . . . I attribute
to giving me everything that I’ve got.

CP: Do you remember . . . were there a lot of
wartime romances?

SE: Oh my goodness, yes. Yes.

CP: Was it like spur of the moment romances, or
did they last?

SE: Well, I think probably was kind of a mixed
bag there. I think a little bit of
both. I think of some of my classmates
that got married and hey, if they’re both still alive, they’re still married, I guess. I wouldn’t know how to quantify that. How to put a number on how many
lasted and how many didn’t.

CP: You know, when you weren’t alive during World
War II, then when you hear people speak about wartime romances, then they make
movies about it, it just makes it sound so romantic.

SE: It was. We were, I think, more a nation of romantics then than we’d ever been
before during World War I, what they call the Great War. They didn’t call it World War I because they
didn’t know there was going to be a World War II. So it was simply called the Great War, the
war to end all wars, which didn’t happen and then along came World War II. But yeah, I think the music, the art, both
performing and visual art and everything of the times, it’s lasting and some of
those old movies are just real motion picture epics.

CP: I know. I just wanted to ask you if you have an opinion about the atom bomb
being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

SE: You bet.

CP: What is it?

SE: The best thing we did. People don’t understand and of course there again
there’s no way to quantify how many lives we did save as a result of that. But I have about a ten or twelve page
document which was top secret in 1945, for eyes only for commissioned officers.

CP: Do you still have it?

SE: I still have it and I’ll give you a copy of
it. It explains to you what we were
doing and the buildup and the preparation of the invasion of Japan; what
we could have expected. It would have
been the annihilation of two civilizations. You had to understand the mindset of the Japanese at that time. It brought to a close the global conflict of
a terrible world war. We, and I say we,
I speak as one of the Army Air Corp, we did checkerboard bombing with
incendiary bombs in Dresden and Hamburg and we burned those cities worse than
an atomic bomb could destroy one. We did
the same thing in Japan. These two atomic bombs, they just stopped the
war.

CP: Saved a lot of lives, don’t you suppose?

SE: We had an armada of ships, not like the
olden days when you think of the Spanish armada, but out in the oceans that
were heading with full crews and personnel, pilots and everybody, heading for Japan for
this invasion when it was called to a halt.

CP: Really.

SE: I’ve talked to some of my old pilot friends
that I’ve come to know over the years and they said, "Hey, I was on that ship
when they got the news that the war was over and that ship did a one hundred
eighty and just came right back from where we left from."

CP: Really. I bet they were glad.

SE: Oh, you bet.

CP: I’m going to backtrack just a little bit,
because you were in high school when Pearl Harbor was
attacked.

SE: Yes.

CP: What happened in the town of Tulare,
probably TulareCounty also, but
since you grew up in Tulare, when Pearl
Harbor was attacked, what was the response of
everyone? How did you feel?

SE: Most people didn’t even know where Pearl
Harbor was. See
that was a time in 1941, that was a time when in a rural area such as this, we
had many people living in homes that had no electricity and no running
water. We had many homes where you might
have had those two, but they might not have even owned a radio. Television hadn’t been invented yet, so you
see, what I knew about anything was what I had learned in school. What did I know about Pearl
Harbor? I didn’t
know anything about Pearl Harbor. Someone says. "It’s in the Hawaiian
Islands." I said, "Okay."
I could visualize that.

But we
didn’t know what kind of war machine the Japanese had nor what kind of
capability they had. Automatically all
of us hunkered down and we turned out the lights and had blackouts; people
didn’t go anywhere. We had people with
rifles and flashlights out on the sand dunes along the coast of California wondering when the Japanese were going to invade our beaches. So, there was a lot we didn’t know. So, our reaction was mostly to what we didn’t
know. In that day and age, probably the
old adage would prevail, that you hope for the best and prepare for the
worst. We really, as a nation of people,
prepared in case an invasion did come to the continental United
States.

CP: What was your attitude or those of your friends
towards the Japanese or the Germans or the Italians or the Russians?

SE: With the Japanese it was kind of different,
because the Japanese were markedly different from you and me as White
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American types, don’t you know. And it was easier for
us to, just by their ethnicity, set them aside. They were easily identified. Now
the Russians and the Germans, the Italians,they lived just like you and
me. That’s where most of us in this
country came from. Having said that, I
think we resented not so much the Japanese people, but we resented the attack
on Pearl Harbor. It just happened to be the Japanese who did
that. You see, I was going to school
here with a lot of Japanese kids.

CP: Really.

SE: And the boys I was playing ball with and
going to high school with, they just disappeared. They went into the service.

CP: They went into the service?

SE: If you take a look at the contribution of
the Nisei Japanese to our total war effort during World War II, that is an
amazing story of bravery and dedication to country and everything else. I had some other Japanese friends who just
disappeared and we knew where they went. Nobody would say anything about it, but they went off to an internment
camp and that’s another great story, too.

CP: I think this is just about the end of the
questions I have for you. I could sit
here and talk for two more hours and I think you could too.

SE: Come back some time when you don’t have
anything to do, and we’ll just sit here and talk. I love to do that.

CP: Thanks very much for your time. Would you like to have a copy of this?

SE: Well, if you’ve got the machine rolling and
you want to crank out a copy of it, yes.

CP: Would you like a typed copy?

SE: That would be wonderful.

CP: Okay, thanks a lot.

SE: You know, someday my kids and grandkids
might like that. Patrick Edwards was
adopted, and I married his mother, Shirley (Lindley Harrill) in 1950. We had one child together, Christina,who adopted Kayla Edwards. Patrick and his
wife Jolene (Jacobsen) had four children, Jackie, Stephen, Yvonne, and Quirt.

CP: You should tell them so they can go to the
library and listen to it and read it. But
if you have a copy, that would be great too.

SE: Thank you so much.

CP: Thank you.

SE: I appreciate it.

Colleen Paggi/Transcriber: Jan
Chubbuck, 3/4/04/ed. JW 6/22/04

Ed. note: Words in italics are
changes and additions made during a phone interview with Stephen Edwards on January
30, 2006.